When your company is located on the edge of the New Forest and between 2 country parks as well as being only 10 miles from the sea, how you have an impact on the environment around you is always a factor in what you do.
In 35 years we seem to have gone from 'eco fruit cakes' to being 'on trend'. We have kept the same thoughts, values, and reasons all the way through our journey and still have those for the business now. If you ask us what we do, we just say we are
EARTH KIND
We try hard to stay true to our principles, we struggle like everyone else, but we continue to strive. Recycling everything is a given, everything we use gets composted, recycled, and or reused until we can't use it anymore.
There are times we have to have plastic (until the world catches up to our values), so it is never ever used once, and being a creative bunch we come up with new ways of using it so it's not put in the bin.
We look to the past heritage ways of working so we limit how much foam we use,
Chicken wire is reused originally coming from thatch roofs in the local area. Our galvanised mesh has had other lives and we even have used damp sawdust as they did in Victorian times covered in moss to stop it drying out.
Over the years we became more and more concerned with our fresh flower use. The local crops we had when we first began were no longer available and the flowers we used were better travelled than any of us using them.
We thought long and hard and made the decision to do the majority of our work in faux flowers, we still use fresh flowers if our clients require them. we have learned the stories of different suppliers and what they do for the environment and we choose our partners with care.
We are extremely lucky to have partnered up with Forestry England at their Moors Valley site where we are allowed to work alongside the rangers helping them to manage the foliage within the area. We use this foliage in our designs again helping carbon footprints and reusing natural resources.
Faux flowers are hired, washed, and maintained then reused time and time again, we feel this helps offset their carbon footprint. We make sure the washing and maintenance process does not contain any man-made chemicals that could enter the water course.
As time moves on as it always does, things will change, we will tweak and update the things we can do to feel we can continuously call ourselves
Earth-kind
We have all come a long way from being the weird tree-huggers of the last century. Working together is now the new cool thing and being world-aware is taught in schools, we see so much promise for the future.